An orange-aproned venture capital fund
The Home Depot has established Home Depot Ventures, a $150 million venture capital fund created to identify, fund and partner with early-stage companies to accelerate emerging technologies that aim to improve the customer experience and shape the future of home improvement.
"With Home Depot Ventures, we're lending our support and expertise to enable rapid scale of innovation," said Richard McPhail, executive vice president and chief financial officer of The Home Depot. "This is an exciting opportunity to find and scale the next big ideas in technology and retail."
The $150 million fund aims to invest in companies that advance The Home Depot's ability to provide a seamless interconnected shopping experience, develop new and differentiated capabilities, and extend its low-cost provider position.
Examples of the type of ideas that the fund intends to develop include:
• Simplify how people invest in their homes, including initial purchase and move-in, ongoing maintenance and repairs, and renovations or remodels;
• Improve the lives of Home Depot associates and enable them to collaborate more safely, easily and efficiently to meet the rapidly changing expectations of customers; or
• Improve overall retail operations.
The Atlanta-based retailer also pointed to a successful history of investing in startups. Success cases include Afero, a secure, end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform to provide smart capabilities for products in virtually any industry; Loadsmart, a freight technology company designed to help shippers and carriers price, book and move freight more efficiently; Made Renovation, an end-to-end digital platform for bathroom renovations; and Roadie, a crowdsourced delivery platform that enables same-day delivery to more than 20,000 zip codes nationwide, which was acquired by UPS in 2021.
The new Home Depot Ventures fund will consider investment opportunities in businesses at various stages of development, with an emphasis on early and growth stage companies that solve challenges for The Home Depot's customers and show potential to scale.